Romancing the Courtroom Anecdote: Henry Cockburn’s and Walter Scott’s Shared Historical Form

Abstract:Henry Cockburn’s memoirs borrow formal qualities from Walter Scott’s novels. Despite being a Whig political reformer, Cockburn represented as exciting and picturesque the very aspects of Edinburgh’s past that his reforms did away with. Examining how the form of Cockburn’s memoirs was at odds with their overtly stated politics demonstrates the polyvalent qualities of an anecdote book and refocuses Romantic literary studies on that no-longer-popular remnant of New Historicism: the anecdote. Likewise, Cockburn’s Memorials exemplify the kinds of moral, formal, and political negotiations by which authors mediated the late eighteenth century for their nineteenth-century readers.